Leadership Fundamentals for Start-up Founders

Leadership Fundamentals for Start-up Founders

Hi Scott. I’m giving a talk on leadership to a group of young student teams within our accelerator program. Do you have any “must cover” topics or themes to include for this type of audience, or good stories to set the tone for an engaging conversation? A couple of broad areas I know I want to cover are: discovering your own leadership style, and best practices for building diverse teams. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Hi Keleigh. This sounds like an exciting opportunity to support Start-Up Founders. I suggest two additional topics – (1) storytelling and (2) reflection.

One highly engaging activity is to help people craft personal stories that are applicable in their business context. I recently had the opportunity to go through this process with facilitators from The Ariel Group, an organization that focuses on authentic communication. It is incredible how quickly you can connect with other people and develop a trust-based relationship through personal stories. Start-up Founders have many stakeholders to connect with – customers, investors, partners, recruits, for example – and storytelling can accelerate the trust developed in these important relationships. This article lays out The Ariel Group formula for storytelling.

The second topic I recommend is reflection. When everything is moving so quickly it is easy to forget to take the time to reflect on what you learned during the day, what new questions you have or what assumptions you have that may be challenged. Daily writing in a journal can be a powerful ritual for leaders. This HBR article outlines some of the benefits of a practice of reflection. Best of luck with your talk!

Hi Natalie.
Thank you so much for the feedback and suggestions on topics for my talk! Interestingly enough, I am also co-hosting a young alumni/senior student career development event at my business school on “building your career story.” We’re planning to facilitate an activity where attendees can craft the framework for a personal story to share with the group, and then amend it for various uses as they work to build a personal brand for a job search or career plan.

On the subject of storytelling, I couldn’t agree more. Storytelling is a vital medium which helps to forge cultures.

When you think of major civilizations in history, the act of storytelling (whether oral or written) was key to “cultivating” a shared value system. “Mythologies” might lean towards a more impressionistic interpretation, but they are key to binding people together and transmitting a view of the world which becomes “common” within a tribal group.

We have lived in an era of demythologization – where we are determined to separate myth from reality. There is a time and a place for an honest, rational assessment of things – but in order to build a culture to form, the legends are key to inspiring people to aspire to an ideal. Rediscovering storytelling is a key vehicle to ‘romancing’ people to wed themselves to lofty goals.

One person whose work I have found interesting on this topic is Stephen Denning:

First, I have found going through the concept of disruptive innovation — really going through it — is highly applicable to startups. The reason I say really going through it is the word has become a meaningless buzzword in many contexts. If you explain Christensen’s foundational work, it helps to highlight:

1. What makes something disruptive … at its core, the idea should create a new market or transform an existing one by making the expensive affordable or the complex simple, and be wrapped in a business model that doesn’t make sense for market-leading incumbents.

2. What causes the dilemmas of disruption … in essence data lags, customers mislead (the best customers aren’t often interested in early-stage disruptive ideas), and the business model binds.

This helps people working on startups to see different choices they could make, whether they should be going after incumbents or working through them, etc.

Building on Natalie and Steven’s points, when asked to talk about the new tools that good strategists need in a world of uncertainty, I usually highlight six things:

1. Periphery hunting (going to the edge to see tomorrow today)
2. Assumption identification (you can’t prove something that hasn’t happened so you need to know what you don’t know)
3. Kite flyer (you have to be good at designing, executing, and interpreting experiments)
4. Zombie hunter (make sure projects don’t turn into zombies that have no hope but shuffle along sucking the innovation life out of the organization)
5. Chameleon leader (beyond ambidextrous … someone who acts differently based on the context. Today is about proof, tomorrow is about possibility)
6. Story telling (covered already)

Two other books I would recommend are Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh and The New Leadership Literacies by Bob Johansen.

Hi Scott. I’m giving my talk on Wednesday, so I’ll still be able to reference your new tools for strategists. I especially like number 5 (Chameleon Leader); in particular how it relates to maintaining your own authentic leadership style, but ensuring that it is flexible given the audience and situation at hand.